


life is tough my dear, but so are you

by IceEckos12



Series: the marks they left behind [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, everyone from the original crew tries to make things a little bit better, luffy is not quite over ace's death yet, someone hold his hand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 19:27:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13083762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceEckos12/pseuds/IceEckos12
Summary: Luffy shatters quietly, privately, and then picks the pieces of himself back up again.But he doesn't have to do it alone.





	life is tough my dear, but so are you

Most days, the Thousand Sunny is a place of laughter, a place of joy and light. The sun sits crisp and clear on the horizon before the Strawhat crew, and adventure is stumbled upon rather than searched for in every nook and cranny of their loyal ship. 

Most days, Zoro sprawls like a lazy cat in the sun, and Nami and Robin sit side by side, sipping fancy drinks and reading their respective novels. Sanji swans by them, somehow in time with the dancing notes of Brook’s fiddle, the music swirling around the ship like a siren's call. Franky grumbles over the most recent repairs he has had to do on the ship; Usopp grumbles over his latest invention, or plays games with Chopper, who is more often than not distracted by some disease he’s researching. 

And above it all, linking them all together, is the deep, rolling belly laughs of their mad captain. The crew will shout and shake their heads at him while hiding secret smiles in the corners of their eyes, fond and exasperated all at once. He is the sun around which they all orbit; the gravity which pulls them all to his side. 

And yet--

And yet some days--

\---

Nami sighs as she enters her room of charts. They stretch before her, her greatest treasures, lining the walls with her careful lines and spidery font. 

It is--quiet, on the ship today. It didn’t start out that way; Luffy had managed to rope Chopper and Usopp into a game of hide and seek, and Usopp’s counting had been so loud that Sanji had complained about it, all the way from the kitchen. But that has faded, and Nami hasn’t heard a peep for almost an hour, which is unusual. 

She’s not...worried, per se, but she is curious. It’s not like--

She stops in her tracks when she catches sight of a familiar figure seated at her desk. It takes her a second to find her voice, stunned as she is, but--she hadn’t noticed him. Normally he’s so...loud, and in motion. Even when he’s sleeping, he is never so still as he is now, leaning over her desk. 

“L-Luffy?” She asks hesitantly, careful to keep her steps light and her tone soft. At any other time, any other moment, she wouldn’t hesitate to yell at him to stop playing in her map room, but--

There’s something about him right now, in the way he tilts his shoulders, or the way his fingers curl loose on the edges of her desk that sets off alarms in her head. 

Nami steps up beside him, and looks down. Her breath catches in her throat. 

She remembers this map. She remembers the way her heart had trembled because her fingers couldn’t as she drew the sweeping lines, put the memory of that island, that _place_ , onto paper. She remembers the way she’d accidentally blotched the _E_ at the end of the island’s name, and how after she’d finished she’d let out a shaky, exhausted breath. 

Nami sighs slowly, quietly, and drags one of the chairs in the corner to the desk so she’s seated next to her captain. As carefully as she dares, Nami slides the map of Marineford out from under Luffy’s unblinking gaze, and replaces it with an image of the latter half of the Grand Line. 

Then, she carefully threads her fingers through Luffy’s, and begins murmuring the next leg of their journey, a soft wave of words that mean nothing and everything. She tells him of summer islands, of winter islands, of islands so deeply buried in mystery that they rival Raftel in legend. 

Nami slowly calls her captain back home. 

\---

Sanji lets out a stream of curses as he charges back into the kitchen, vague anxiety settling in the back of his throat. He’d left the kitchen for a second, just for a second, to bask in the presence of Nami and Robin. And because of his distraction, he’d gotten into an argument with Zoro, and then he’d remembered--

There was meat cooking in the kitchen. There was a delicious slab of steak settled onto a pan on the stove, and it was no doubt _burning_. 

Not only was that a complete insult to his abilities as a chef--he did not serve charred meat, ever--but it was no doubt going to be a waste of food. How could he? How--

Sanji nearly trips over himself sliding into the kitchen, and gags a little at the scent of burned steak. He lifts the pan from the stove and slides the meat onto a cutting board nearby, careful not to singe his fingers as he does so. 

Sanji cuts into the center of the steak, wincing at the sight of the dark outside and well-cooked middle. It isn’t great, definitely not, but--not unsalvageable, he decides, taking a step back so he can study the burns. If he cuts off the outsides, and chops up what is leftover, he can probably just--

He turns around to reach for a bowl, but stops in his tracks by the sight of his captain. “L-Luffy!” Sanji exclaims, bewildered, because--he hadn’t noticed Luffy in his mad rush to get to the meat. Then he relaxes, and straightens up. “If you’re hungry, you’ll just have to…”

He pauses, because Luffy isn’t...moving. Luffy is standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at nothing, his eyes distant and dark. 

“...Luffy?” Sanji asks, uncertain, because he had seen that sort of look before, that haunted one, but never on his captain, never in this place. Luffy loves the Thousand Sunny, and Sanji doesn’t think it’s so crazy to say that the feeling goes both ways--so why did it look as though he’d just seen a ghost?

And then Sanji breathes in the still pungent, overpowering scent of burning meat, and feels his stomach drop. 

Sanji lifts the board that holds the half-dissected cut of meat, and walks outside. There is a pang in his chest as he thinks about the waste, but he throws that sentiment away along with the burned food into the ocean. Then he walks back into the kitchen, takes his captain by the shoulders, and settles him into one of the chairs at the dining table. After a second thought, Sanji also grabs a trash bin and places it on the ground next to the table. 

Then, he sits in one of the chairs next to Luffy, and threads his fingers through his limp, unresponsive hand. And Sanji begins to speak. He starts a low murmur of words--stories about All Blue, about all the things he was going to make when he finally got his hands on those fish. He casts out a line to his captain, and patiently waits for something to bite. 

He only lets go of his captain’s hand a half hour later, when the younger boy throws himself to one side so he can throw up in the trash can next to the table. 

\---

Usopp likes being in the Crow’s Nest. 

That isn’t to say that he likes heights--his stomach rolls dangerously if he looks down too hard, and he won’t spurn others’ company just so he can sit up there, but. It’s just--it makes him feel useful. Half of his crewmembers are nearsighted, the other half farsighted, and everyone knows that Usopp has the best eyes in the crew. 

He likes to think that everyone feels a little safer with him up here, his hawk-sharp eyes on the horizon, alert for any incoming attacks. He doesn’t actually know if anyone does feel safer, but it makes _him_ feel better, knowing that his crew is safe in his hands. 

He’s about halfway through his watch, the moon hanging heavy over the calm sea, when the door to the upper deck slams open. 

Usopp peers over the side, squinting in confusion, because the next watch is two hours away. He can’t quite make out the person’s features as they stride to the railing, grasping the wood with white-knuckled fists, and--

The moonlight catches the person’s face just right. The scar on Luffy’s cheek is outlined for one harsh moment, and then is hidden in shadows. 

Usopp doesn’t call out, doesn’t say a word. Instead he crawls over the side of the Nest, and makes his way down to the deck. 

By the time he’s landed, he can make out all of Luffy’s features; sees the dark shadows over his eyes, and the fine trembling throughout his body. It’s like his hands, clenched around the railing, are the only things holding him up. 

Usopp watches him for a second, resigned, because this is not the first time his captain has come storming outside, sweat glistening on his deeply tanned forehead. Luffy used to get nightmares before Marineford, before his brother died in his arms, but they never used to bother him this much. 

Usopp has mentioned it once, sidelong, to Zoro. Because, well. If there was one person who knew Luffy better than anyone, it was his first mate. And Zoro had told him one thing, given him one piece of advice, which Usopp had followed simply for a lack of a better thing to do. 

So Usopp makes his way over to Luffy’s side, crowds his space a little bit, but not enough to be stifling. He gently tugs Luffy’s white knuckled grip from the railing, and flips up his palm so that he can loop his hand around the other boy’s. 

And then he begins to speak, to fill Luffy’s ears with something less gritty and raw than the screaming of his nightmares. “Have I ever told you about the time I defeated a Sea King that was shaped like a killer whale? It went a little something like this…” 

\---

Zoro has no fucking clue why the others come to him with stuff like this. 

When Usopp comes to him asking what he should do about Luffy’s nightmares, or Nami about her stupid maps, or Sanji about his fucking _burning meat_ \--

It’s not like he feels any less helpless than they do. It’s not like he had any idea what to do when Luffy came to him that first time, plastered himself to Zoro’s side and just sat there, like he was incapable of doing anything else. Like he was a vacuum, a black hole where light and sound was gobbled up, and what was left was only nothing. 

Hell, Luffy had practically told him what to do--laid his head against Zoro’s shoulder and looped their hands together and stayed silent, 

silent, 

_silent_. 

And Zoro had wanted to say something, wanted to tell his captain that he wasn’t weak, he wasn’t--

He’d felt as though he couldn’t say anything. His instincts had told him that the minute he said ‘what’s wrong’, the minute he drew attention to Luffy’s mood, something would shatter. So he hadn’t done anything; just let Luffy sit there and hold his hand. 

So that’s what he does whenever Luffy comes and finds him, curling against him like the world’s most prickly security blanket. He sits there and lets Luffy hold his hand, lets his captain draw strength from him when it feels like he doesn’t have enough of his own. And he knows that it’s stupid--they both know that it’s stupid. Luffy has plenty of strength, more than he perhaps knows what to do with--so the idea that he needs to borrow anything from Zoro would leave anyone else puzzled. 

But they had thought that before, too. They had believed firmly in their captain’s strength before Kuma had stamped a message into all of their chests’, that they were not nearly as safe as they thought they were. They had believed that their invincible captain would win, again and again, and keep winning, and that they were invincible too. 

And Luffy, despite popular belief of his idiocy, is suddenly, painfully aware that he is not invincible. That sometimes even his strongest isn’t strong enough, and the other guys can win, even if it isn’t fair. He grasps Zoro's hand and begs, silently, to lend him enough strength to protect everyone. 

The realization is crushing. 

Zoro knows this. It doesn’t make it any better when Luffy comes to him, face achingly blank and eyes dark, and leans against Zoro like his first mate is the only thing holding him up. He wishes he knew how to fix this, how to do something other than just hold his captain’s hand, but--

But--

He doesn’t. The only thing he can do is hold Luffy’s hand, and hope that just for now, he can make things a little better.

**Author's Note:**

> you know what makes me sad? i know this isn't the crew's fault, but like. Luffy was there for all their hardest moments; he shouldered their stories like he was fucking atlas. but they COULDN'T BE THERE FOR HIM. like, where is the justice there. someone hold this boy's hand.


End file.
